Work Text:
The White House is silent after the scandal.
America is familiar with it, knows it well and knows how to distinguis it from the silence after a vote, the silence after a death, the silence after a war begins and a war ends. Each silence has different weight, a unique texture. This is the silence after someone has said something true in a room full of people who were not prepared it and now do not know what to do.
Alice has said something true. The something true involved language that the White House staff are describing as colourful. The recipient of the language is described, in the same careful vocabulary, as a guest who made certain remarks. The remarks are not described in detail cause they are unremarkable as of right now, but America knows what they were because Alice told him, with the flat unembellished directness she applies to everything, standing in the east corridor with her hat still on and her eyes very bright, like she did something that has cost her nothing and is slightly puzzled by everyone else's distress about it.
Theodore receives him in the study, his natural habitat in the same way that the outdoors is his natural habitat - always slightly too large for it, always slightly in motion even when standing still, the energy of the man in constant negotiation with the dimensions of whatever space he is currently occupying.
He is behind the desk when America enters. The desk has numerous stacks of paper on it, unmoved and untouched.
"I know why you're here."
"Then let's skip the preamble."
"Please."
America sits.
He has a quite the history with Theodore Roosevelt, a man more akin to a force of nature pointed in a direction one can onlu agree with. He is the twenty-sixth president and one of the most American things he as a country has ever produced, in the complicated way that that is a compliment and a criticism and an observation simultaneously.
"She was right," America says.
Theodore looks at him.
"The man said something that should not be said to another person. Alice told him so. She was right."
"She used language that was uncalled for," Theodore's tone is more aperformance than a delivery he genuinly believes in.
"She used accurate language and she was right about that too."
Theodore exhales, releasing an argument he had prepared and has decided, on reflection, not to make. He looks at the papers on his desk. He picks up a pen and puts it down again.
He is a man who finds the smaller domestic negotiations of life more difficult than the large ones, who can charge up San Juan Hill without breaking stride and find himself at a loss in a corridor with a daughter who has just scandalized the White House.
"She needs more of you," America adds with the tone he uses when he is saying something that will not be received easily and knows it. He says it anyway.
Theodore is still: "America-"
"I know what you're going to say."
"Then you know that I'm not going to pretend the work isn't real. The work is real. What happens in this room affects millions. What happens in the corridor-"
"Also affects people. Will affect people," America tries to find the right words, as he often does when the right words are about something he cannot yet fully see - something that is still becoming, still resolving from the fog of the present into the eventual clarity of the past. The words are slightly ahead of him, he is reaching for them, they are there but not yet graspable.
"She stood up for her friend, that counts something," he pauses, "She needs to know that someone sees her."
Theodore is quiet for a long moment. When he speaks, his voice is stripped of performance, of the vigour and the emphatic delivery and the teeth and the energy. It's just the voice of a man saying the true thing plainly: "I am the President of the United States," he says, "or I am her father. I have not found a way to be both. I have looked for it - I want you to know that I have looked for it - and I have not found it. That is not an excuse. It is simply what is true."
America sighs. He doesn't refute those words, nor endorses them; he just adds them to the accumulated record of what it costs to be a country.
"I know," Alfred says, at last.
He does. He knows the weight of the desk and the thirty million people and the decisions that get made in rooms that change the shape of the world, and he knows that the weight is real the man behind the desk is carrying something genuine and not pretending. He also knows, coming from being a country, from being made of everyone and carrying in his own structure both the greatness and the failure simultaneously - that the corridor is also real. That the daughter is also real. That the cost of the desk is paid in specific currencies by specific people and one of those specific people is a girl who stood for her friend and hopes that her father would have aknowledge it.
Alice is in the garden, thje palce where she goes when the White House becomes too much of the White House. She is sitting on the bench near the roses with her hat in her lap and a book open in her hands that she is not reading, and she looks up when America sits down beside her with the expression she always wears when she has decided in advance that she is not going to be lectured.
"I'm not here to lecture you," he says.
"Everyone is here to lecture me."
"I know. I'm not."
She looks at him sideways-— the assessing look, the look that she has been giving people since she was small, so much like her father's. America òikes it: he finds it deeply, specifically American - the refusal to simply accept the version of a person they present, the insistence on seeing the thing behind the thing.
"You did the right thing.".
Alice is quiet for a moment.
"I know," she says, serene, like the required external confirmation to be sure, "He said something atrocious and I told him so. That is... That is simply the correct sequence of events."
"Not everyone would have."
"More people should."
"Yes."
He means it.
Alice turns a page of the book she is not reading.
"Miriam was embarrassed," she add, more quietly, "That bothered me more than what he said, almost. That she had to stand there and be embarrassed while that beast..." her eyes are suspiciously bright, "It's not right that she should be the one embarrassed."
"No," America says. "It isn't."
"It will keep happening."
"Unfortunately yes."
"Until people stop letting it happen."
"Yes."
She sighs like she found a solution to the problem and doesn't understand why the problem still exists.
America looks at her, at the hat in her lap and the unread book and the bright eyes and the absolute unself-conscious certainty of a young woman who has not yet learned to be less than what she is in order to make other people comfortable and who may never learn this - who may be constitutionally incapable of it, which is going to make her life very difficult and very extraordinary in roughly equal measure.
What would it mean for his future if more people do not learn to make themselves smaller in order to fit the shape of other people's comfort? If more people who call the word the word, who stand in the corridor and say the true thing to the person who needs to hear it, who embarrass the man who should be embarrassed so that the woman who should not be embarrassed isn't?
He cannot see the shape of it yet - it's too far out, too deep in the fog of what has not yet happened, what he is still becoming. The distance between where he is and where he means to be is a distance that will take generations to close and may never fully close and must be walked anyway, must be walked by people like Alice who simply get up one day and start walking without waiting to be told it is permitted.
He is a country that was founded on a set of ideas that have always been slightly ahead of his ability to live up to them. He has known this about himself for a long time and has found it, depending on the day, the source of his deepest shame and his most stubborn hope.
Alice, beside him, closes the unread book.
"Are you going to say something meaningful?" she asks, direct - like her father, so much like her father.
"No."
"Good."
She puts her hat back on, at the angle she always wears it: "I'm going to write to Miriam. Tell her she shouldn't have had to stand there for that," she stands, "That seems more useful than sitting here."
"It is."
She goes.
America sits in the garden for a while longer with the roses and the spring light and the question that does not have its answer yet.
What would I be?
He does not know.